The present invention relates, in general, to a compressed gas tank for a motor vehicle.
For some time, the automobile industry has undertaken efforts to replace currently used liquid fuels, such as gasoline or diesel fuel, with gaseous propellants for ecological reasons, because gaseous propellants can be operated with little release of pollutants. Examples of propellants that are predominantly envisioned at this time include hydrogen or natural gas.
In order to ensure an adequate range for gas-propelled motor vehicles, it is required to sufficiently compress gas to enable installation of a compressed gas tank in the available space in the motor vehicle. However, the installation space available in motor vehicles is very limited for compressed gas tanks. Conventional compressed gas bottles allow only poor exploitation of the existing installation volume, i.e. only a very small amount of compressed gas can be made available so that the driving range of a motor vehicle is too short.
Containers for compressed gas are normally made of steel. For strength reasons, the containers have a spherical or cylindrical shape with spherically configured end faces. To keep the container weight as low as possible, the wall thickness of the gas container is increasingly made thinner. While current joining techniques are able to maintain sufficient tightness of the gas container, there is the problem of reaching the limit of the admissible strength of the gas container at the prevailing high internal container pressure.
It would therefore be desirable and advantageous to provide an improved compressed gas tank which obviates prior art shortcomings and which is constructed to maximize the available installation space in a motor vehicle while still reliably meeting the safety requirements demanded from a gas container.